24,637 research outputs found
Illuminating an Ecosystem of Partisan Websites
This paper aims to shed light on alternative news media ecosystems that are
believed to have influenced opinions and beliefs by false and/or biased news
reporting during the 2016 US Presidential Elections. We examine a large,
professionally curated list of 668 hyper-partisan websites and their
corresponding Facebook pages, and identify key characteristics that mediate the
traffic flow within this ecosystem. We uncover a pattern of new websites being
established in the run up to the elections, and abandoned after. Such websites
form an ecosystem, creating links from one website to another, and by `liking'
each others' Facebook pages. These practices are highly effective in directing
user traffic internally within the ecosystem in a highly partisan manner, with
right-leaning sites linking to and liking other right-leaning sites and
similarly left-leaning sites linking to other sites on the left, thus forming a
filter bubble amongst news producers similar to the filter bubble which has
been widely observed among consumers of partisan news. Whereas there is
activity along both left- and right-leaning sites, right-leaning sites are more
evolved, accounting for a disproportionate number of abandoned websites and
partisan internal links. We also examine demographic characteristics of
consumers of hyper-partisan news and find that some of the more populous
demographic groups in the US tend to be consumers of more right-leaning sites.Comment: Published at The Web Conference 2018 (WWW 2018). Please cite the WWW
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A First Look at QUIC in the Wild
For the first time since the establishment of TCP and UDP, the Internet
transport layer is subject to a major change by the introduction of QUIC.
Initiated by Google in 2012, QUIC provides a reliable, connection-oriented
low-latency and fully encrypted transport. In this paper, we provide the first
broad assessment of QUIC usage in the wild. We monitor the entire IPv4 address
space since August 2016 and about 46% of the DNS namespace to detected
QUIC-capable infrastructures. Our scans show that the number of QUIC-capable
IPs has more than tripled since then to over 617.59 K. We find around 161K
domains hosted on QUIC-enabled infrastructure, but only 15K of them present
valid certificates over QUIC. Second, we analyze one year of traffic traces
provided by MAWI, one day of a major European tier-1 ISP and from a large IXP
to understand the dominance of QUIC in the Internet traffic mix. We find QUIC
to account for 2.6% to 9.1% of the current Internet traffic, depending on the
vantage point. This share is dominated by Google pushing up to 42.1% of its
traffic via QUIC
Antitrust Analysis for the Internet Upstream Market: a BGP Approach
In this paper we study concentration in the European Internet upstream access market. Measurement of market concentration depends on correctly defining the market, but this is not always possible as Antitrust authorities often lack reliable pricing and traffic data. We present an alternative approach based on the inference of the Internet Operators interconnection policies using micro-data sourced from their Border Gateway Protocol tables. Firstly we propose a price-independent algorithm for defining both the vertical and geographical relevant market boundaries, then we calculate market concentration indexes using two novel metrics. These assess, for each undertaking, both its role in terms of essential network facility and of wholesale market dominance. The results, applied to four leading Internet Exchange Points in London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Milan, show that some vertical segments of these markets are extremely competitive, while others are highly concentrated, putting them within the special attention category of the Merger Guidelines
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